History in the new South Africa: an introduction - Det danske ...

which took place in a proliferation of conferences, workshops and meetings. Negotiations
propelled the emerging black middle class to the forefront of the black opposition by
providing this group with substantial new political resources, including much-enhanced space
to engage in the economic policy process.
The economic debate was not a tabula rasa from which any outcome could emerge, the
winning policy to be decided simply by political contestation amongst the contending parties,
the ANC and the National Party government. In fact there were certain ‘structural
imperatives’ reflecting the economic context in which the transition took place and which all
sides had to address. The foremost issue was the urgent revival of growth, which would
require increases in both foreign capital inflows and domestic fixed investment. Antiapartheid
forces had argued during the 1980s that South Africa’s exclusion from international
trade and capital flows was necessary to reduce growth and thereby force whites to the
bargaining table. The effectiveness of this strategy made it impossible to argue just a few
years later that growth could now be reinvigorated without foreign capital inflows or re-entry
to rapidly globalising international financial and trade markets. Similarly, even if a major
economic role for the state was desirable, this would be possible only as a longer-term goal;
raising domestic investment in the short term required establishing business confidence
amongst domestic and foreign private investors.
Very soon after their unbanning, black opposition leaders acknowledged the growth and
investment imperatives facing South Africa, and moved to reassure domestic and foreign
investors while insisting on the need to address apartheid’s distributive legacy for reasons of
social and political legitimation. A redistributive priority articulated early on by the ANC
involved deracialising the ownership and management of the existing large corporate sector,
notwithstanding that this affected “the sanctity of private property” (Mandela, 1990). The
ANC was also mindful of the threat posed by ‘macroeconomic populism’ to the sustainability
of its own long-term project, as illustrated by the fate of the Unidad Popular government of
Chile in 1973 and of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the early 1980s, two
progressive governments with popular support which had fallen at least in part as a
consequence of the problems resulting from their very government expenditure.
The process of the economic policy debate was also crucial to the way in which specific
reforms were introduced. The transition was long (four years) and the debate was
decentralised, unco-ordinated and unofficial. There was no centralised political or technical
co-ordination and therefore considerable space and autonomy for policy initiatives to
proliferate, promoted by small interest groups. The ANC increasingly behaved like a
‘government in waiting’, while the existing state became increasingly incoherent and
disorganised, even though many officials actively participated in the process.
A third important factor was the inherited capital stock. South Africa’s transition was
different from others where capital assets and their owners were either physically destroyed
by war, or politically defeated by revolution, or forced to evacuate the economy by
decolonisation. The existing capital stock was very large and diverse, with manufacturing
dominated by capital-intensive resource-based materials processing (basic metals, chemicals,
pulp and paper), and these sectors would be the main beneficiaries of a shift towards exportled
growth. An overwhelming proportion of the private capital stock was still owned by white
business, a group which thus retained substantial power. As a result, there were limits on the
scope and pace of shifting output and technology to more labour-intensive paths and of the
transforming capital asset ownership away from a white monopoly.
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